City council will decide Wednesday Sept. 30, whether or not to approve Pinnacle International’s rezoning application for a proposed 55-storey luxury high-rise at the north end of Granville Bridge. (Over the years, the project has crept up from 52 to 54 and, now, 55 storeys.)
By the time you read this blog, city council may have already made its decision.
This property was previously owned by the City of Vancouver. Before selling it to the current developer, long-time journalist Bob Mackin reports in theBreaker.news that it was zoned for a 17-storey tower, a six-storey low-rise and a four- to five-storey low-rise.
The city-owned site was also slated for so-called social housing — a definition changed by Vision Vancouver in 2014 to mean residential developments where a majority of the housing units are rented for as much as the market can bear.
The current proposal includes 152 of these kinds of so-called social housing units, which, according to CityHallWatch.ca, is 129,000 square feet of social housing when it could have been 45% more. That would be an additional 187,000 square feet, or roughly 60 more units, which is something, even using the city’s current flawed definition of “social housing”!
As a strong proponent of genuinely affordable housing — where rent is no more than one third of a person’s income — I must point out a question many are asking: Why didn’t city council retain ownership of this property back in 2016? The answer also lies with Vision, as you’ll see below.
Then we need to ask, why didn’t subsequent city councils follow up and make sure that whatever was built on this site be entirely devoted to rental units that are genuinely affordable?
The marketplace has for many years now proven itself incapable of delivering the quantity of truly affordable rental housing our city is desperate for.
For 10 long years — from 2008 to 2018, including the time this site was sold — city council was controlled by Vision Vancouver, a party that was very heavily dependent on large donations from Vancouver real estate developers. As such, it consistently failed to take a balanced approach regarding the best use of city-owned land.
The other thing that bothers me, and many others who have been working to block this proposed project, is its 55-storey height and the huge amount of additional density at that critical location.
Many of the individuals and groups opposing Pinnacle’s rezoning application have also pointed out it will block the views of many Vancouverites and shade a small neighbourhood park.
Now that Vision Vancouver has been booted off city council, it’s time for the new council to be bold and do what voters put them there to do: Stake out a new direction for Vancouver, and do everything in its power to build genuinely affordable housing in a way that doesn’t line developer’s pockets with more profits.
What we definitely don’t need is another “pinnacle” of a landmark to Vision Vancouver.
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (Sept. 28, 2020): 411.04 ppm
One year ago (Sept. 28, 2019): 408.09 ppm
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